She digs into past to honor old soldiers

GRAND RAPIDS -- Robert Keeler was buried in Oakhill Cemetery more than 143 years ago, but Eloise Haven probably knows more about him today than his fellow Civil War veterans did when he died.

"He was born Robert Keillor, the oldest of 10 children," Haven says, spelling out his family surname as she points to his gravestone.

Keeler probably changed the spelling and falsified his age to escape a crowded family situation when he enlisted in the 7th Michigan Cavalry, Haven explains. When he died of an undetermined illness in 1864, he was just 15 years old.

Thanks to Haven's work and her Veterans Remembrance Project, Keeler and the 67 other soldiers buried at Oakhill's Soldiers Cemetery are not fading away. Haven has seen to it that Keeler and 20 of the other soldiers buried near him have new headstones, courtesy of the U.S. government.

She has worked with cemetery officials to raise and reposition other headstones that have fallen or sunken into the soil.

The 61-year-old Kentwood resident says her goal is to identify and preserve every veteran's grave in the city's cemeteries.

Haven, who earned a master's degree in history from Central Michigan University after she was discharged from the Air Force in 1970, began her work with the Civil War veterans buried at Oakhill Cemetery on Grand Rapids' Southeast Side.

That's where her great-grandfather--a Civil War veteran himself -- was buried in 1922.
Relying on old cemetery records, military pension records, newspaper clippings and genealogical records, Haven painstakingly has documented each soldier's life in a thick loose-leaf folder.

Her most exhaustive efforts have focused on the old Soldier's Cemetery, a collection of plots in Oakhill Cemetery that were purchased by the federal government after the Civil War for burial of veterans.

Many of the 67 veterans buried in the cemetery were given wooden headboards that quickly deteriorated or disappeared, Haven said. Other marble gravestones have seen their markings worn down over the years.

Some of the graves marked "Unknown" now have names, thanks to Haven's tenacious research.

Haven says she is learning many of them had families in the area.

Haven's work also has been hampered by poor record-keeping and a fire that destroyed most of the records in the Oakhill Cemetery offices in the late 1880s.

She also is dealing with a lack of resources. Because there is no backhoe at the cemetery, she has to wait for another burial, then cajole cemetery workers into placing the new stones on the old soldiers' graves.

Trudie Anderson, who runs the city's Cemetery Division office, says Haven is doing work that is "long past due."

"It takes a lot of time and dedication and someone who has a love of what they're doing to accomplish what she's accomplishing," Anderson says.

Haven, who began her project 2 years ago when she moved to West Michigan from upstate New York, says her project has a mission that goes beyond tidying up the city's cemetery records.

"Part of America's problem is basically that she's forgotten who she is," Haven says. "Americans have no idea of what it's like to have war on your own soil."

More than 700 men fought in the Civil War at a time when Grand Rapids was a small community of just 8,000 residents, she says.

Many of them returned with limbs missing and disfiguring wounds, she says. "For years, there must have been constant reminders."

Haven estimates it will take at least another 50 years to complete the project.

After her Civil War research is concluded, there are the veterans to research from the Spanish American War, the War of 1812 and the Revolutionary War.